Comfort Sex
by Marnie
Summary: By the time Gwen goes home to Rhys in Exit Wounds, Jack and Ianto have a lot of grief, fear and anger to deal with in their own special way.


It started the moment Gwen could finally be pried off Jack and sent home to her husband. Ianto put the hub on lockdown, turned around to find Jack staring at the trail of blood, trembling slightly, tears dripping from his chin.

"I wasn't far off the mark when I called you a monster, was I? How many more of your psychos are out there?"

Jack's head snapped up, his eyes widening in hurt, disbelief, and Ianto shoved him hard in the chest, stepped forward as he recoiled and did it again, backing him toward the stairs.

"Don't do that, Ianto." Jack's tremble became a visible shudder, the rhythmic hiss of his breathing picked up, loud in the cavernous, deserted room.

"Or what, Jack? You'll set your brother on me? They say insanity runs in families."

Jack's heel hit the bottom step, there was nowhere left he could retreat to, but Ianto shoved again, fear and anger making him feel huge, invulnerable as he let them fill his veins with black fire. "Show me what you can do, Jack. Go on – be a fucking hero!'

Jack shivered like a rope fraying; Ianto could feel the knot unravelling even through the spread hand he had braced on Jack's chest. "Can't take me? Can't make me shut up, Jack? Don't be pathetic."

He felt the rope snap, the wave of fury through his fingertips as Jack put his head down, growled, going for his throat. Jack got a grip on his collar, wrenched. Grappling, his fingers digging hard into the tendons of Jack's wrists, Ianto felt his shirt tear just as Jack kicked his legs out from beneath him – he swung from Jack's big hands by the tie, feet frantically trying to find purchase. Thrown against the stairs, his head collided with the edge of a riser, and just for a moment it was Canary Wharf all over again – he was fighting for real, fighting not to get dragged down the corridor into the whirring saws.

He tried to gasp 'Jack…!' but Jack's hand was still knotted in his tie, cutting off his air. His chest laboured, tight, heavy, black and he writhed against the steps, shirt pushed up to his armpits, cold tile splitting his skin, bruising his backbone. Unable to speak, torn between panic and lust, he flailed at Jack's hand, bending back the little finger until Jack let go, smacked him casually across the face and closed his teeth in Ianto's bicep.

The pain joined his fear and fury into a red rush of lust and he was back, back with Jack as Jack gathered both his wrists in one hand, held them over his head, cursing in long alien phrases as he wrenched at his belt.

Flipped over, pants round his ankles, grazed cheek being grated on the concrete as Jack thrust, pressed down by Jack's hand on his head, Ianto could hardly recognize his own voice; grunting, screaming obscenities. Pleading. Jack's litany of filth tearing at the edges, growing more and more ragged until it too became great heaving sobs. With a final jerk and shudder he came, lay in a sodden heap, weeping – snot on the back of Ianto's neck, semen trickling down one leg, and the grime and blood of the step rubbed damp and gritty into his shirt.

"Thirty pounds of good tailoring down the drain," he said ruefully, wiping his eyes on his sleeve. Jack, do you think you could get off, I can't breathe."

Jack rolled reluctantly to one side, hands still knotted in Ianto's hair. Gingerly, Ianto wriggled out of his shirt and used it to wipe Jack's scrunched up, tearful eyes. He wasn't one for cuddling, and especially now with all the new bruises combining into a single throb he would rather have got up, had a shower, put on something clean. But Jack, Jack needed touch the way some people needed to speech – dumb and desolate without it. So Ianto forced himself to fit his limbs into the hollows left by Jack's body – now huddled like an abandoned child in the cold abyss of the control room. Lifted his hand to tuck Jack's head beneath his chin, stroke the sweat-pointed shaggy brown hair.

As he did so, his dislocated shoulder reminded him it had put up with enough shit for one day; an electric shock of agony arced across his chest, making him seize up with a whimper. Jack raised his head sharply. "Did I hurt you for real?"

The sex was fantastic, and the physical stuff – hugging if he couldn't avoid it, dancing, if he had a point to make – he could put up with. But that – that sharp concern, that focus narrowed down and trained on him, as though he _mattered_, that was what he craved like an addict craves his needle. He didn't need to force the loosening of his abused muscles in relief, the irrepressible smile. "Well, it's not something I'd want all the time, but bloody hell that was amazing."

"Forgive me?"

This too he lived for; Jack's honesty. The flashes of someone real beneath the armour of charm. Someone who needed him.

"Some people exchange roses," he said, "but I don't mind if we swap psychopathic loved ones instead."

"Was that a yes? Do you forgive me?" The shiver had started again, moving through Jack's shoulders like a tide, goosebumps stood out on his arms, and Ianto sobered rapidly.

"What have you done?"

"This – Cardiff. Owen. Tosh. I wasn't… if I'd only…."

Ianto pulled Jack to his feet; 'up, Jack, I can't lift you – my shoulder.' Dressing him, almost paternally – efficient, fond, dispassionate - he steered Jack over to Torchwood's ancient sofa, soft as a giant marshmallow, though not as sweet. "Sit there, I'm going to make tea."

"Not coffee?"

"Tea, it's better for the shock. Three lumps of sugar for your blood sugar levels." Possibly, Jack's continually replenished cup of life regulated blood sugar as a matter of course, but hot sweet tea was traditional. When he returned with it – a spare T shirt over his bruises – the first sip made Jack, conditioned by over a hundred years of British life, draw in a huge sigh of relief.

Ianto sat down on the sofa beside him, just close enough so that their legs and shoulders almost touched. He had meant to say 'none of this is your fault,' but as he meditatively stirred the sugar in his own cup – like spinning a prayer wheel – he realized it was not what Jack needed to hear. "Yes. That was a yes. I forgive you. I always will."

Jack's face scrunched up in an expression that mixed misery with hysterical laughter. Turning, he buried himself in Ianto's side, clinging tight, breathing like a man in pain, then settling, settling, growing heavier, until he was sprawling there, relaxed and drowsy. Restraining the desire to edge away to a more comfortable distance, Ianto put out an arm and drew him closer. Their shared warmth was soothing as night and the fountain's chill filled up the hub with damp, cold air.

"What happened, Jack? Where did they take you? How did you get back?"

The little whisper of a laugh, and Jack said "They took me back to 27ad, buried me in a grave below Cardiff. I lay there for nearly 2000 years, and then Torchwood dug me up and put me in the vaults. I woke up where I started from."

"They… you… Buried alive?!" Ianto turned, to feel Jack's warmth over more of his body, to touch a hand over the man's heart and feel it beating. He could imagine it, earth in his throat, waking to terror, panicking, clawing at the ground, gasping in more soil as he thrashed for breath, and agony and death, and waking again to do it over and over and over for two thousand years. "Jack! How the hell are you still sane?"

"Hey," Jack looked up for the first time, worked his fingers into Ianto's hair, dislodging brick dust and small flakes of rubble. "Hey…" Leaning in, he kissed Ianto's split lip, kissed his mouth as it opened readily beneath his lips, and something golden and bright passed on his breath. When it ended, the little wounds on Ianto's face were gone, and the ache of his shoulder faded to a faint throb.

"It's not as bad as it sounds. Grey didn't reckon on the fact that there wasn't enough air down there for me to come around properly. I was unconscious the whole time – didn't know a thing until I was dug up again. OK, the first death wasn't one of my best, but it beat the whole guillotine incident hands down. At least I didn't have to stagger round Paris afterwards, searching for my head. And let me tell you, that's not my best look"

He put the teacup on the floor, brought out the flask from down the back of the sofa, and looked at Ianto with a conscientious ghost of his normal sparkle. Subdued still, but no longer shivering. "So what do you say to brandy and comfort sex? I've got two thousand years of enforced celibacy to catch up on."

Ianto smirked – the desire to laugh not being appropriate under the circumstances – and took a long drink of liquor; heat pouring down his throat. "That's too big a job for just me, sir. I'll draft in some volunteers and draw up a rota in the morning."


End file.
